Since the last decade of 20th century, the “virtual” economy (or “web economy”, or “net economy”, or “new economy”) has been widely accepted as a technology which influences the production of goods and services and the distribution of the same (Kollmann, 2002, 2011), providing a global platform over which people and organisations devise strategies (Haltinwager, Jarmin, 2000; Kollmann, Hàssel, 2007), interact, communicate, collaborate, co-operate (Walley, 2007; Branderburger, Nalebuff, 2011) and search for information.

Expanded versions of papers presented at the International Workshop on Information Technology for Chinese Medicine (ITCM), held in conjunction with the 2012 IEEE International Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM2012).

The current apparent obsession with terrorism, particularly in the USA, could be a natural progression from the “red scares” of the anti-communist McCarthy era of the 20th Century and the subsequent Cold War, stretches back to 19th Century political scaremongering and has its roots in deliberate campaigns by the capitalist elite, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies.

Doomsday proclamations seem to have been present throughout history. It might be argued that imminent the plagues, pestilence and destruction associated with armageddon stories fed this for centuries, not least through religious mythology. In the modern era, as visions of hell and damnation ceased to grip the imagination of lay people quite so strongly as they once did, demons and ghosts made way for new threats – alien invaders, epidemic diseases, the coming ice age, global warming and countless others. Then there are those who promote a colourful threat from across the globe one that somehow will extinguish “our” way of life as it invades our homelands and our homes: the reds under the bed, the yellow peril, the bearded enemy with dark skin.

It’s all intrinsically locked into racism and ignorance, of course. Many of the threats facing American society arise not from the outside but from the enemy within, the deranged or psychopathic shooter on a college campus, the home bombmaker with a serious grudge, the agencies that spy on our every move, our every email and the reformers of education who proclaim that evolution is just a theory and that their creation myth should be taught alongside science as a valid perspective on reality.

Now, Geoffrey Skoll of the Criminal Justice Department, Buffalo State College, New York and economist Maximiliano Korstanje of the University of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, have built on social analytics work to come to the conclusion that capitalist elites have built on centuries of fear and modern obsessions and an inherent tendency in too many people to xenophobia. For their argument the team makes the significant disconnection between perceived reality and what is actually happening in the world:

“It is irrelevant whether Communist spies threatened US security, or whether crime has increasingly threatened personal security since the 1960s, or whether terrorists have and continue to pose a substantial threat to Americans and their way of life,” they say. “Causal relationships are set aside, for instance, between crime rates, the actual occurrence of crimes, and the burgeoning criminal justice apparatuses such as police and prisons.”

Some researchers, most notably Steven Pinker, have argued that we live in the best of times, not the worst of times, today, he says, humans are less likely to encounter violence and murder than at any time in our past. This may well be true. Moreover, crime rates have indeed fallen, we are more likely to negotiate with former enemies on sharing trade routes and swapping email addresses than ever before. Acts of terrorism certainly occur, but thankfully despite 24/7 media coverage outside the most unstable regions, violence and destruction remain the rare tragedy.

“Persistent fear is easily transferred to irrational objects,” the team says. “The working classes have had residual, and often realistic, anxieties about losing jobs, losing homes, not getting healthcare, and not having sufficient retirement income, to name some of the more prominent. These are not new. The culture of fear does not and cannot neutralise such fears, but it can offer transference objects.”

If the terrorists become the focus of blame for the everyday problems we all face, just as it was the devil in centuries past and the communists after the Second World War, then it is not the capitalist elite who must face up to the complaints consumer advocates nor the politicians to the disgruntled voters. The greater majority of the people can simply vent their anger and frustration on the nameless devil that is the terrorist.

“The culture of fear encourages diffidence and dependency on authorities, just as does over-protective parenting,” the team argues. “Atomised social relations turn the potential for liberation movements such as those from the 1960s into identity politics. Together, the new social relations and the dominant culture of the 21st Century produce a ‘great and powerful Wizard of Oz’ that demands fear and obedience.”

It is perhaps time to pull back the curtain and reveal that “Oz” for what it really is.

Traditional finance and economic theories provide many concepts and useful solutions to the main problems involving decision making under risk and uncertainty. However, all these approaches are based on the assumption that economic agents are rational.

When considering entrepreneurs, who make decisions to start a new venture in a complex setting and manage many quantifiable and non quantifiable risks in the course of their business, the assumption of rationality is strongly debatable. The same remark applies to investors, and particularly VCs, who choose such ventures for investment purposes.

The academic field of behavioural finance offers the opportunity to include psychological, social and emotional characteristics in the analysis of entrepreneurs and VCs financial decisions.

With this issue, we intend to cover the whole spectrum of behavioural topics in entrepreneurial finance as outlined below. We welcome conceptual and empirical research.

28 October 2013

If you often find yourself running after a bus, escaping a burning building or taking part in competitive athletics in high-heeled footwear, you may be storing up knee problems for later in life, according to a study published this month in the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology.

9 out of 10 wearers of high-heels report associated soreness, fatigue, numbness and bunions when wearing such footwear. Despite this, the wearing of high-heels apparently represents an ongoing fashion statement. It gives the wearer a shorter stride, a purportedly more graceful gait and a superficial “shaping” of the leg towards the slender. It is perhaps no surprise then that given the perception of increased attractiveness and an apparent boost to self-confidence that high-heeled footwear remains popular despite the pain.

Now, Yaodong Gu, Yan Zhang and Wenwen Shen of the Faculty of Sports Science, at Ningbo University, in Zhejiang, China, have demonstrated that there are additional long-term risks for wearers of high-heels who find themselves regularly having to run.

The team measured the hip and ankle movements in young women running in different types of footwear – flat shoes heel (15 mm heel), low heel (45 mm) and high heels (70 mm). The team observed an increased motion of range of knee abduction-adduction and hip flexion-extension while the volunteers where running in high heels. This, they explain, could induce high loading forces on knee joints. Moreover, they observed a decrease in ankle movement and inversion while running that correlated with heel height, which would be linked to a greater risk of sprain. The researchers suggest that the higher the heel the greater the risk of an ankle sprain if running.

Perhaps more worrying than an ankle sprain in the long-term is that their findings suggest that the regular use of high-heeled footwear may contribute to osteoarthritis of the knee joints. The greater movement and force focused on the knees while running in such footwear being the major risk factor. Although the team studied only a small group of women aged 21-25 years in laboratory conditions, it is likely that other people wearing heeled footwear would be exposed to the same risks of injury and joint wear and tear.

The extended use of digital technologies in physical, biological and artificial environments enables artists to design and implement new forms of art.

This call for papers is aimed at the artistic and scientific communities interested in extended arts. We solicit original manuscripts that highlight recent successes and define major research challenges. We hope that contributions will chronicle the current state of the art, the challenges that lie ahead, and the evolution of future directions.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the XARTS 2013 International Conference, but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

History of extended arts - Digital art was first confined to research aiming specificity at defining a domain that would be recognised as such by the artistic community. Very soon, however, artists began exploring hybrid solutions to integrate digital media in real or artificial spaces, later targeting the seamless integration of human, digital and physical activities in holistic and systemic environments. We are interested in papers relating the passages from one era to the next, analysing the works of art and the artistic motivations with critical thought.

Theory of extended arts - Convergence of new media with bioart, 3D fabrication and prototyping, nanotechnology and physical computing is examined under this topic. Among the disciplines concerned, cybernetics, biosemiotics and radical constructivism are confronted in a pluridisciplinary approach. We are interested in papers proposing theoretical models explaining such a convergence, examining multiple parameters of this integration process.

Artistic practice - Digital art, interactive art, immersive art, open art, extended arts; a lot of terms aiming at describing the artistic practice are proposed by artists and scholars in the field. In this section we expect papers that describe recent art works (from 2000 to the present), authored by the artists themselves or the producers of their works in a quest of self-analysis of the artistic practice, whether it takes a distant approach or not.

Research in progress - Ongoing research from undergraduates, graduates/postgraduates and professionals is considered under this topic.

23 October 2013

Advanced surface engineering has been widely applied in different industrial sectors. Recent developments in surface integrity, surface treatment or modification, micro/nano-structure fabrication, surface grinding and polishing, metrology on micro/nano patterns, thin film deposition or coating and analysis of advanced machining are highly related to manufacturing processes.

This special issue will provide a forum for scholars, researchers and engineers to present recent research exploring the challenges and/or surmounting difficulties in advanced surface engineering in manufacturing processes.

An open access special issue of the International Journal of Global Warming brings together, for the first time, empirical evidence of loss and damage from the perspective of affected people in nine vulnerable countries. The articles in this special issue show how climatic stressors affect communities, what measures households take to prevent loss and damage, and what the consequences are when they are unable to adjust sufficiently. The guest-editors, Kees van der Geest and Koko Warner of the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, Germany, introduce the special issue with an overview of key findings from the nine research papers, all of which are available online free of charge.

‘Loss and damage’ refers to adverse effects of climate variability and climate change that occur despite mitigation and adaptation efforts. Warner and van der Geest discuss the loss and damage incurred by people at the local-level based on evidence from research teams working in nine vulnerable countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Kenya, Micronesia, Mozambique and Nepal. The research papers pool data from 3269 household surveys and more than 200 focus groups and expert interviews.

The research reveals four loss and damage pathways. Residual impacts of climate stressors occur when:

1) existing coping/adaptation to biophysical impact is not enough;
2) measures have costs (including non-economic) that cannot be regained;
3) despite short-term merits, measures have negative effects in the longer term; or
4) no measures are adopted – or possible – at all.

The articles in this special issue provide evidence that loss and damage happens simultaneously with efforts by people to adjust to climatic stressors. The evidence illustrates loss and damage around barriers and limits to adaptation: growing food and livelihood insecurity, unreliable water supplies, deteriorating human welfare and increasing manifestation of erosive coping measures (e.g. eating less, distress sale of productive assets to buy food, reducing the years of schooling for children, etc.). These negative impacts touch upon people’s welfare and health, social cohesion, culture and identity – values that contribute to the functioning of society but which elude monetary valuation.

The publication of this set of research papers is very timely as loss and damage will be a key topic during the climate negotiations in Warsaw next month (11-22 November 2013), and empirical evidence is still scarce. The findings also contribute to the emerging body of literature on adaptation limits and constraints, a topic that – for the first time – is discussed in a separate chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group 2 (IPCC AR5 WG2).

The issues that have arisen through this research point to an even greater urgency for ambitious mitigation and adaptation that are sufficient to manage climate stressors. If this goal is missed, loss and damage will undermine society´s ability to pursue sustainable development.

"The special issue of the International Journal of Global Warming focuses on a crucial topic: 'Loss and damage' which refers to adverse effects of climate variability and climate change that occur despite mitigation and adaptation efforts," Editor-in-Chief Ibrahim Dincer of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology says. The issue reports on the first ever multi-country study on this emerging topic from the perspective of vulnerable communities in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The research papers included show that current mitigation and adaptation efforts are not enough. People across the study sites were not passive victims of climate change. A large majority implemented a wide variety of adaptation and coping measures to avoid impacts of climate stressors, but these measures were often insufficient or came at a cost. The negative effects were not simply monetary, there were cultural losses and non-economic costs, in terms of time investment, social-cohesion and livelihood security, were also widespread. "IJGW positions itself uniquely by addressing the issue and offering solutions," Dincer adds.

Please contact the corresponding author, Koko Warner, by email on warner@ehs.unu.edu for further information on the research published in the special issue.

In the interests of enhancing global discussions of critical and urgent issues arising from climate change now, the research papers are being made available by Inderscience Publishers free of charge to all readers from 23rd October 2013 at the following link:

Foreign affairs and diplomacy have traditionally been instrumental in the management of relations between states. In the era of globalisation, the understanding of the management of international affairs has become decisive to successful and effective interactions among states, global firms and institutions.

This special issue is devoted to foreign affairs, applied diplomacy, international business and globalisation, and seeks papers that will contribute to the understanding of contemporary developments in this field.

Organisational design issues are becoming increasingly relevant to very small (VSEs) and small and medium (SMEs) entrepreneurial ventures. It is well recognised that from the time of their inception, VSEs rely extensively on various types of support through both formal (e.g. business support providers, incubators, etc.) and informal networks, to complement internal capabilities and competences that are lacking.

Yet, little research has been conducted on the role organisational design plays at these early stages, where the entrepreneur must negotiate, for instance, trade-offs between entrepreneurial and administrative actions. At perhaps different scales, are these organisational design tradeoffs in VSEs and SMEs similar or different to the ones that consist in resolving tensions between external entrepreneurial supports versus internal activity coordination? Is organisational design in an entrepreneurial context a search for a fixed outcome or an evolving activity as the venture follows its development? What are the possible interorganisational design dependency and coordination issues that need to be balanced for VSEs and SMEs at the early development stage?

This special issue is devoted to research aimed at understanding implications of organisational design in early-stage venture development in VSEs and SMEs. We seek papers that explore how such organisations address organisational design issues arising from having to balance their need for external knowledge and support with internal action coordination. This tension may represent a genuine challenge in such firms as they generally lack an abundance of resources and capabilities which would otherwise reduce the need for balancing organisational design issues.

Potential research topics might include but are not limited to research that offer insights into the performance implications of organisational design; adoption of strategies for organisational design in early-stage ventures; balancing external support and internal coordination; strategies of early-stage ventures for organisational design that supports the building of firm-level resources and competencies (human and financial resources, etc.); creation of dynamic capabilities; and implications for organisational performance, innovation and sustainability.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Impact of entrepreneurial administrative actions and processes on organisational design

Organisational design as an evolving activity in entrepreneurial development rather than a search for an outcome

VSEs' and SMEs' organisational design and the role of internal and external uncertainty

Organisational design and its influence on the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities, whether locally or internationally

External information and its influence on entrepreneurial development and organisational design

Interorganisational design priorities and issues for VSEs and SMEs

We welcome contributions that tackle organisational design and related issues from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives. Contributions to this special issue may take a range of form s(case studies, action research, grounded theory, design science, statistical analysis and simulation), may focus on different units and levels of analysis, and may employ quantitative, qualitative or mixed research approaches.

The International Journal of Innovation in Education has appointed a new Editor-in-Chief, Professor Dr. Nicole Kimmelmann, and a new Executive Editor, Professor Des Hewitt. Professor Dr. Kimmelmann is from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitt Erlangen-Nrnberg in Germany and Professor Hewitt from the University of Derby School of Education.

A generational movement consisting of creative consumers who modify proprietary offerings, and of members of society who in turn use their developments, all without any moral and legal considerations. Think video and audio mashups, jailbreaks for game consoles, unlocked mobile phones, tuned cars, even ‘hacked’ vacuum cleaners that can now be controlled remotely, via mobile phone apps.

Authors Jan Kietzmann of the Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and Ian Angell of the London School of Economics, UK, have coined the term “Generation-C”, in the spirit of the well-known Generation-X and others, to encompass these “constantly connected citizens – creative, capable, content-centric, and community- oriented – who collectively communicate, collaborate, copy, co-develop, combine, contribute and consume common content.”

Writing in the International Journal of Technology Marketing, the authors discuss the resulting controversies associated with existing intellectual property rights, and suggest that the future can only bring conflict if such legislation is not changed. Generation-C will only grow as more and more of our products become increasingly modifiable, and as creative consumers freely exchange their ideas for product improvements online. The authors propose that governments and politicians should allow creative consumers’ derivative innovations for the ‘good of society’ and for the benefit of their economies. This is a controversial perspective – one that intellectual property rights owners would rather not debate.

The article concludes with important messages to organizations, intellectual property rights lawyers, owners of property rights, governments and politicians, suggesting they reconsider the impact that the current intellectual property legislation has, not only on those who modify proprietary products, but on all of us.

18 October 2013

This special issue aims to bring researchers together to present the latest advances in the fields of sustainable products and processes, industrial energy efficiency and sustainable manufacturing systems; process modelling, system modelling, control and optimisation; material handling, production planning, scheduling, and smart and automated systems to increase efficiency and reduce the ecological impact of manufacturing processes and systems.

This issue invites the submission of high-quality research articles relating to sustainable manufacturing systems.

Cloud computing and big data share similar intrinsic features, such as distribution, parallelisation, space-time and being geographically dispersed. Utilising these intrinsic features would help provide cloud computing solutions for big data with computing infrastructure capability to process and obtain unprecedented information. At the same time, big data poses grand challenges as opportunities to advance cloud computing.

This special issue aims to provide a fresh and state-of-the-art report on relevant recent advances in cloud and big data technologies. It will attempt to address the different technical challenges related to cloud and big data technologies from different perspectives by providing a good overview of the differentiated approaches that are currently possible and promising. The issue also aims to introduce readers to the challenging, multi-faceted and broad scope of cloud and big data technologies, and to present an up-to-date picture of current hot topics and state-of-the-art solutions in the field.

Big data and smart computing are emerging research fields that have recently drawn much attention and interest in computer science and information technology as well as in social sciences and other disciplines.

This special issue will include revised and substantially extended versions of papers presented at theInternational Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing (BigComp 2014), organised by KIISE (Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers). In addition, it strongly solicits high-quality original research papers and new work-in-progress reports in any aspect of big data and smart computing from researchers worldwide who are unable to participate in the conference.

The International Journal of Supply Chain and Inventory Management provides a unique focus by explicitly linking supply chains with inventory management. Inventory, transport, location of production and storage spaces significantly influence supply chain performance. Modifications of inventory policies can lead to a dramatic alteration of supply chain efficiency and responsiveness. Increasing supply chain inventories will improve customer service and revenue but also increase supply chain cost. Therefore, key areas to be explored include the correct sizing of inventory, links with supply chain efficiency and impact on logistics services.

Value creation is the main objective of any business. Historically, value has been created inside the firm and then distributed to the market. This firm-centric perspective has established the role of the firm as the creator of value and separated the market from the value creation process. With the rapid pace of technological innovation, the scope of value creation has expanded to include a broader range of activities with other business entities. In other words, value is created in a collaborative network where various stakeholders can share their knowledge and experience in the design and development of new products/services. This network-centric perspective is called value co-creation. For example, UPS and Toshiba have agreed on a new laptop repair process in which UPS picks up broken Toshiba laptops, fixes them in its own facilities and returns them to their owners within four days. Another good example is the BMW Group’s Co-Creation Lab, a website for consumers who want to share their thoughts on BMW products/services. Those consumers can access a variety of projects directly from the website and contribute their suggestions. Clearly, the co-creation view has become central in the development of new products/services.

The concept of value co-creation has been an object of interest in various academic disciplines. The marketing literature delineates the dynamics of value co-creation under service-dominant (SD) logic. SD logic suggests that consumers engage in a dialogue and exchange of value with their suppliers from the early stage of product/service development. The field of information systems examines how innovative uses of new technologies create new value co-creating opportunities for individuals, firms, industries, societies. Strategic management pays attention to the concept of open innovation to explain how various internal and external resources are combined in a platform to create new organisational values.

The purpose of this special issue is to present a collection of up-to-date understanding on value co-creation. The role of consumers and suppliers in creating value, the corporate strategies of value co-creation, and the impacts of value co-creation on firm performance are all of interest in this special issue. Papers that primarily highlight the features of new value co-creating technologies are also welcomed, but the focus should be more on the uses of new technologies.

Possible topics for this special issue include, but are not limited to:

Computer modelling and simulation, as a powerful decision making tool, plays an increasingly important role in aeronautics and astronautics through, for example, simulation analysis, real-time data processing, parameter optimisation and so on. Computer application requires continuous research and development to guarantee the advancement of aeronautics and astronautics.

Authors are invited to submit articles presenting research work, case studies and applications, both theoretical and applied.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Advanced modelling and simulation technologies in aeronautics

Advanced modelling and simulation technologies in astronautics

Advanced computer control astronautics and astronautics

Environment simulation and modelling for astronautics and astronautics

US research reveals that 4 out of 5 college student drivers have used their cell phones to send or receive text messages while driving despite the majority recognizing that the activity represents a risk. Garold Lantz and Sandra Loeb of the McGowan School of Business, at King’s College, in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, found that male drivers are more likely to engage in texting while driving but consider themselves more proficient drivers than others and so less likely to endanger themselves or others while doing so.

Analysis indicates ‘texting impulsiveness’ is positively associated with people who text frequently and those who text while driving, the team reports in the International Journal of Sustainable Strategic Management this month.

Earlier studies have suggested that texting while driving is on a par with driving while intoxicated with alcohol as a significant risk factor for highway accidents. Indeed, some research suggested that texting slows driver reaction times more than being drunk. Other studies reinforce the myth of multitasking and show that very few (2.5%) people can competently undertake two or more tasks at once. Moreover, our brains allow us to focus completely only on a single task at any given time, so those people demonstrated as multitaskers are simply better at switching seamlessly between two activities. Texting while driving is already banned in some countries, including the UK for this reason.

“There seems to be a mentality that use of electronic devices is dangerous for everyone but ‘me’,” the team says. While the US government has introduced a public awareness campaign based around the “distraction.gov” web site, the means to correct for such a risky practice as texting while driving is in dispute. The team’s study provides useful empirical evidence regarding attitudes to this issue.

“If further research conclusively demonstrates that texting while driving is as dangerous as driving drunk this study suggests that a promotional campaign should be undertaken to assure that this point is clearly understood,” the team suggests. Lantz points out that, “Our study, particularly our measurement of impulsiveness, is exploratory. We have been working to develop that measurement and it is still a work in progress,” he says.

Business process management (BPM) and information systems are experiencing an increasing symbiosis following the shift of focus from data to processes. A growing number of business processes are currently enacted under the supervision of information systems, leading to significant improvements in terms of both performance and compliance.

Organisations strive to streamline and optimise their processes to achieve productivity gains. In addition, BPM provides organisations with knowledge that gives them the opportunity to transform their value chain and innovate.

This special issue welcomes submissions that address the potential of BPM for decision making support.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at 10th MCDA Workshop – HELORS (Thessaloniki, Greece, 21-23 November, 2013), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Process analytics

Process measurement and metrics

Process mining

Business process governance

Managing process change

Big data and BPM

Business process optimisation

Workflow management

Important Dates

Deadline for full paper submission: 28 February 2014
Notice of acceptance/rejection: 30 May 2014
Revised paper submission: 30 June 2014
Final decision: 15 August 2014

Wireless robot and sensor networks (WRSNs) have emerged as a confluence of disparate wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and multi-robot networked systems. The potential merits stemming from this mutual collaboration not only enhance and complement existing WSN applications but also introduce a plethora of novel applications that require autonomous and intelligent interaction.

WRSNs are expected to play crucial role in building future cyber-physical systems and promise unprecedented and limitless opportunities. However, such integration introduces various challenges such as collaboration and coordination, task allocation and fulfilment.

This special issue aims at presenting recent advances and hot issues in the design, implementation and evaluation of architectures, algorithms and protocols for existing and prospective applications of WRSN. Moreover, this special issue is expected to spark and promote further research in this multidimensional domain.

Original, unpublished research and survey/tutorial articles are solicited in all aspects of WRSNs and their variants. In particular, we welcome the submission of survey/tutorial articles.

A byproduct of the manufacture of pulp using the sulfite process for making paper, sodium lignosulfonate, can be used to immobilize and soak up toxic chromium compounds from soil and water, according to research published in the International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development.

Konstantin Volchek and Carl Brown of Environment Canada, and Dario Velicogna of Velicogna Consultants Inc in Ottawa, have carried out two successful parallel tests of efficacy on a laboratory scale. The first involved removal of chromium ions from water using reagent binding and membrane separation and the second was the stabilization of chromium ions in the soil using chemical soil flushing. Lignosulfonates can bind hexavalent chromium and allow it to be removed from contaminated water by subsequent membrane filtration. The soil tests showed that lignosulfonates can reduce the mobility of chromium so that it becomes trapped within the soil matrix; in the field this would reduce the risk of it leaching from a contaminated site into the underlying water table or waterways.

Chromium has many uses in industry but its accidental and even deliberate release into the environment has led to widespread contamination of soil and water. However, chromium salts are also naturally present in rock and soil at relatively high concentration in certain parts of Greece, Italy and the USA. Chromium(III), which carry a 3+ electrical charge and chromium(VI) 6+ charge are the most stable and so the most common. Cr(III) is not very soluble and although it has some toxicity it is the highly soluble and so mobile Cr(VI) that is a significant cause for environmental and health concerns. Cr(VI) ions are both toxic and cancer causing.

There are various technologies that might be used to extract chromium(VI) ions from contaminated soil or water. However, these usually require the addition of expensive chemicals to allow the heavy metal ions to be extracted or immobilized. A much more sustainable approach would be to use a reagent that was just as effective or more so and that was itself a waste product from industry. Sodium salts of lignosulfonates from the paper industry offer such an alternative, the researchers say.

“Inexpensive, effective and easy to use reagents that reduce chromium toxicity and mobility would make a remediation technology more attractive and competitive,” Volchek and colleagues reports. The lignosulfonate first reduces toxic Cr(VI) ions to the less soluble and less hazardous Cr(III) and these bind strongly to the lignosulfonate molecules and can then be removed by membrane filtration.

The increase in population and the number of cars on the road, the emergence and expansion of mega regions with dense populations, cost and capacity limitations for adding new roads and highways, global climate concerns, energy resource constraints, urban road traffic congestions and increasing demand for vehicle fleet operations are just a few of the drivers for the development and advancement of intelligent vehicle transportation (ITS), vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication and connected vehicle technologies.

These systems represent a group of technologies that connect vehicles to other vehicles or to infrastructure receivers and monitoring centres to improve transportation system management and vehicle fleet operation, as well as individual vehicle operation including powertrain and vehicle controls for safety, fuel economy and emissions.

This special issue aims to present innovative technologies and applications of ITS and V2V networking technologies in powertrain and vehicle control.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure new technologies and applications including monitoring, cloud computing and IT

ITS and V2V networking applications in vehicle and powertrain control and diagnostics

ITS and V2V networking applications in fleet vehicle management

ITS and V2V networking applications in start-stop, hybrid and electric vehicles

Intelligent driving assistant systems and eco-driving

Applications of ITS and V2V networking information in improvement of vehicle and fleet fuel economy, emissions and safety

Suspension systems are of great importance to ride comfort, handing and safety of road vehicles. Unsurprisingly, the design of suspension systems has attracted considerable attentions during the past few decades. Compared with passive suspensions, active and semi-active suspension systems have the capacity to improve the compromise between ride, stability and handling by adjusting suspension damping in real time. Active and semi-active suspensions are expected to become an integral part of future vehicles, beyond the production vehicles that have already adopted them. The proliferation of such advanced systems is aided by the customer demand for improved vehicles, the broad availability of electronics and controllers in most automobiles and the emergence of electric vehicles with novel propulsions such as in-wheel independent electric drives.

The aim of this special issue is to document some of the recent advances in active and semi-active suspension research and development. Of particular interest are papers that are devoted to the most innovative design and control of advanced suspension systems with vehicular applications.

The advancement of web search has focused on developing tools and algorithms that will take you to the most apt page given your search query. Of course, as we have known from the heady days of the early web back in the mid-1990s the advent and demise of AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Dogpile, Lycos, Yahoo and countless other search engines pretty much all-but drowned in the inexorable wake of Google, we rarely find a single site in the results. Commonly, there are page after page of SERPs (search engine results pages) and those above the fold on page one are not necessarily the most appropriate.

But, focus isn’t everything, the original notion of surfing the internet and thence the web as about the serendipitous stumbling upon something of interest, something that was not necessarily what you were originally after. The emergence of sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit allowed other people to share with you their finds accidental or otherwise and then web 2.0 with its spotlight shining brightly on social has taken that to a whole new level with the likes of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and many others. Indeed, it is almost as if the old-school search engine that spiders and indexes sites without personal context is almost redundant.

Now, James Hendler of the Department of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, New York, USA, working with Andrew Hugill of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, in Leicester, UK, hope to turn the notion of a focused search engine on its head to instill in the search process an element of creative expression that was inherent to the early web. They hope that they can reinvigorate search, not by making it more focused with algorithmic updates and slurpier spiders but by reintroducing the serendipitous, reducing the impact of the social collation and curation. With their approach they want to exploit the precision of semantic web technologies by combining them with the ambiguity of natural language.

Hendler and Hugill talk of the “syzygy surfer”. Syzygy, from the Greek meaning “yoked together”. In their concept they have yoked together, or paired up two very disparate concepts that of natural language, with its fuzzy meanings and ambiguities, which is very difficult to define in computational terms, and the much more algorithmically aligned notion of semantics, definitive definitions and such. Many words are ambiguous, the team says, and contain several possible meanings or embody numerous concepts.

For example, tables can be various different items of furniture but we also have periodic tables, water tables, html web page tables, dissecting tables and times tables…the natural language is multifarious and even a definition that a computer might use would require multiple definitions. An example of where such ambiguity has been used creatively is in the famous physical wooden table constructed to display the chemical elements in their familiar format after the Mendelevian concept of the periodic table. Who knows what creative expressions might emerge from a collision of dissecting tables and times tables or the various other combinations? Such incongruities often underpin humor, as with the periodic table that might double as a dinner table, but also give rise to technological developments such as “table-type” computer systems, such as Microsoft’s Surface. Add a little “t” for a tablet and are we talking tablets of stone, iPads, medication or something else?

The “Syzygy Surfer” – a creative search engine – is currently being developed by the team for the open web.